The Importance of Dreaming
Or: how a girl learned to stop dreaming.
This is how it began.
One day her dreams began to fade.
Her dreams and the world became the same thing.
She was thirteen when this first happened. Things never were quite the same after that.
Earlier, when she was five, she had told her mother that she will be a magician when she grows up.
On her ninth birthday, she announced her goal to reach Mars.
By the time she was fifteen, she had decided to be Frida Kahlo.
Today she is a successful young woman. She works hard, drives a Prius, files her taxes on time and volunteers at the local Goodwill. She paints too, when she can.
Today she is loved and respected by her family, her friends and that special person who only last week offered her a sparkling ring.
But she does not dream the dreams she dreamed before.
Today she is not a magician or astronaut or an artist.
Those were the dreams of a kid, she now tells herself.
They were just dreams.
